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An anonymous reader writes "Yesterday afternoon anti-virus company Sophos Inc. released a normal anti-virus definition update that managed to detect parts of their own software as malicious code and disabled / deleted sections of their Endpoint security suite, including its ability to auto-update and thus repair itself. For many hours on the 19th, Sophos technical call centers were so busy customers were unable to even get through to wait on hold for assistance. Today thousands of enterprise customers remain crippled and unable to update their security software."
Sophos points out that not everyone will be affected: "Please note this issue only affects Windows computers."

Speaking of percentages, I wonder what percentage of anti-virus updates go terribly wrong like this. 0.00001%? AV companies are constantly producing new signatures, many times per day. All it takes is one mistake and you have a loose cannon and a front page news article like this one. It's impressive that there aren't more occurrences.

What's impressive is that this got out of Sophos' testing lab and into production. I guess they must not test signatures in house at all. Congratulations, Sophos customers, you've been promoted to alpha testers.

What's impressive is that this got out of Sophos' testing lab and into production. I guess they must not test signatures in house at all. Congratulations, Sophos customers, you've been promoted to alpha testers.

Actually, it's an incredible show of honesty on the part of Sophos. Perhaps Symantec and McAfee will follow suit and flag their own software as malicious as well.

The trouble, in this case, is that it detects its own signature update componenets as viruses...

Not only should this have been caught in testing(Since it would have cropped up more or less the moment the new signatures were loaded onto a live system with Sophos installed; but they hit files about which sophos presumably has intimate knowledge, this isn't some 'obscure packing/compression scheme used by legacy CAD program that seemed like a good idea in the 80's looks like a suspicious obfuscated payload' kind of thing.

I am not impressed, though thankfully it only took me a little over half a day to fix it here...

While this may work for you, being a careful, knowledgeable slashdotter that I'm sure you are, it would be unthinkable in a business environment. Sophos only makes business products, there is no "Sophos Home Edition," so I don't think your method really applies in this case.

Speaking of percentages, I wonder what percentage of anti-virus updates go terribly wrong like this. 0.00001%?

It's got to be more than that. I remember a few years back that several people in my company who were foolish enough to have anti-virus on their Windows PCs configured to auto-fix problems came in in the morning to find it had deleted some essential Windows DLL files.

That software probably only updated once a week, so you're talking more like 0.1%.

Sophos points out that not everyone will be affected: "Please note this issue only affects Windows computers."

or I would still be cleaning coffee off of monitors, laptop, papers, etc.

I have a couple of old Windows XP installations I can still get to when some idiot creates a web site that only works right in IE (e.g., I live in Colorado and the state has a site for doing your state income tax that doesn't work when accessed with Firefox). Ditto for software like most income tax programs. I don't otherwise use Windows. Even my work laptop is running Linux (Fedora 16).

They also have a mac client, if I recall. If you need A/V for the Windows boxes anyway, plus something on the mail server to snip some of the crap out on the way in, it becomes a fairly easy sell for the vendor to shove a few mac or linux licenses out the door if some of their customers have a paranoic 'zOMG all computers must have antivirus to protect our megahertz!!!" policy. If you have to implement that, it's easier to at least implement it all in one place, with one console, and maybe a volume discount

I got hit by malware on Redhat years ago (the L10n worm) so it does happen.

Anyway, I have a corporate Win 7 desktop with Sophos now and got this bug. Every few minutes it popped up a warning that I had been infected with malware. Very annoying. By the end of today it had stopped, so either IT had fixed it or it had managed to commit suicide. The one time I did get infected with malware on this PC Sophos didn't catch it and I had to download Malwarebytes and fix the registry myself.

So far, there have only been a couple 'proof of concept' viri for Linux. Nobody's figured out a way to pry any money away from us yet.:D

but linux antivirus aren't used to protect linux, they are useful if you run a mail server or a proxy so you can clean mails and webpage before they infect a windows user, or to clean an infected windows installation, for example the kaspersky live cd is based on linux

This is a classic case of not thoroughly testing code and making sure you have enough variations of test machines to ensure as little pain to clients as possible.

Antivirus engines and definitions change daily, weekly at the most. Where do you suppose this "thorough testing" of code is supposed to happen? It costs time and money, and while you're busy doing that testing, the support lines are being flooded with "We've been infected by something your software doesn't protect against! What are we paying you for, anyway?" As a bonus, your competitors, who didn't decide to setup a massive lab with dozens of employees in it, testing all the typical configurations of a half dozen operating systems and the couple hundred most popular software packages of each... they already released a patch.

Now, a software patch that causes the application to stomp on its own dick is amusing (and difficult to forgive), but demanding a massive expenditure of time and money is almost as unforgiveable. It's easy to demand best practices and ample safety margins: It's quite another thing to deliver it in a business environment. Most people in the industry, including the people at Sophos I'm sure, do the best they can with what they're given. It's pretty much the work creed of anyone in this industry -- few have the time and resources to do it right, they have to settle for 'good enough'.

A simple group of ~20 VMs could handle this egregious type of error. Who cares if AV X marks some specialty software with a false positive? It should at least not detect itself! Load the new sigs to the test VMs, and if they don't commit suicide after a full scan, upload the sigs to the prod download servers. At most, this costs a company ~$5,000/year for equipment and ~$40,000/year for labor. That's pocket change compared to how much the company can lose over a screw up like this.

That's pocket change compared to how much the company can lose over a screw up like this.

Emphasis mine. Look, every major antivirus producer has made a similar mistake to this. Sometimes, it takes the whole operating system down with it (Symantec anyone?). Whether you agree or disagree, it's clear there are business incentives for a fast workflow process -- and as the old saying goes "Do it fast, do it right, do it cheap -- pick any two." It's obvious which ones the antivirus industry as a whole has chosen. Rather than argue over whether or not they're right, I'm pointing out why they're making those choices. Businesses aren't willing to pay a premium to avoid mistakes like this. The cost of the occasional screwup like this is less than the cost required to do all the testing and lab work that many here on slashdot seem to support.

Not sure. This issue hit my workplace (state university), and it only affected 2 computers in my office, and I never heard about it from outside the office. I think there were other factors that triggered this.

The fundamental problem is that, no matter what you do, your testing environment is never a perfect replication of the live, end-customer environment. It cannot be, since it's required by virtue of being a testing environment to differ so that you can test things before they go live. What happened here is, the testing environment's method of distributing updates to test differed from live (which it must if it is to be able to test definitions that aren't live yet), and the problem didn't affect the testin

In no particular order. Vipre, Trend Micro WFB, and Symantec Endpoint are all good products. Everything else is a crapshoot. And stay the hell away from McAfee. That shit will eat your servers alive! (no really, blocks registry write backs from most legit software including Windows Updates)

Exactly. Sometimes code that looks useless is really pretty important. The article follow up said they removed this test from an iteration loop, since there weren't comments about what it did. Apparently the original programmers thought it obvious...

I think this was an in-development definition that wasn't meant to be deployed at all. It referenced a virus that didn't exist "shh/updater-b" and Sophos didn't even have a page for that name on their web site when it hit. It flagged anything on the system with "updater" in the path.

As memory serves McAfee did this about 8-10 years ago with an update. It's a sign of poor release management and a failure to follow best practices. If they fail to follow best practices for something like this that is high visibility and customer facing, imagine what they look inside the company.

Every year, we need to go down the list of software makers who have managed to totally Bork their users. The Meltdown awards. Just to distinguish between the companies that handle it well and the companies that are incompetent.

Just think about it. The average Windows AV program runs with sufficient privilege to wreck your system by altering or removing arbitrary files. And it gets fed multiple updates per day created by teams of workers working in a hugely stressful situation: When a new virus appears, you've got to get those signatures out NOW.

We are currently considering switching AV vendors from Kaspersky (our license renewal is coming soon). So the boss contacted Sophos and they sent a guy yesterday to install a demo and got hit with this bug.

Needless to say the guy was pretty embarrassed.

I like ESET nod32 myself, but it seems that the administrative console is not as good as Kaspersky (K's allows to deploy software, turn off machines, send messages to users and lots of other non-AV stuff we actually need)

Yes, this was bad. The virus signature in question appears to match any software that does auto-updates (possibly trying to spot phone-home malware?) so it's flagged dozens of software packages and according to what policy you've set, quarantined or deleted the files. This includes the auto-update part of the sophos client. The flood of emails from the sophos enterprise manager package as machines were switched on this morning quickly alerted us that this wasn't good, and just looking at names of the files it was flagging was enough to see that this was a false positive. Cleanup continues.

We've been very happy with sophos enterprise, and I'm staggered that this signature made it out the door - they should have numerous controls in place to ensure this can never happen and I await an explanation for how they failed.

I'm not too impressed by some of the advice given in their cleanup procedure [sophos.com] - they advise setting the policy to not scan certain sophos directories - guess where viruses may try to hide in future.

This is an embarassing fubar which will have had a high impact on thousands of enterprises. It'll be interesting to see if Sophos come clean about the circumstances and can be convincing enough about how it's never going to happen again.

Well, there are guys like me: I have a tower running kubuntu, a notebook running W7, and an old Dell someone gave me that I repaired, including XP install disks. I want to use that box to sample LPs and cassettes and burn them to CD. EAC won't run on Linux or on any machine without an optical drive, and Audacity simply lacks the features I need. My only choices are XP on the old junker or buy a brand new computer, or build one from new parts and buy W7.

Why in gods name do you attribute this only to Microsoft? It's standard practice because the source of these aren't trustworthy and they're moderately easy to detect. I doubt Microsoft gives two shits if you download a keygen for a video game, yet they will pretty much all be detected by such AV software, generally even free software not theoretically bound by corporate purse strings.

"For keygens, I run them in an isolated VM instance and roll back the disk files after I'm done using them. You can never be too sure."Or you could, I dunno, not use keygens?(I'm sure I'll hear a rejoinder about old software that you've lost the key for, but we all know what people are really using them for).

No, it's more like saying he know how to evaluate (and trust) his sexual partners before engaging in sex, and those that he doesn't trust or can't be sure of, he brings to the clinic to get tested first...

My cousin used to say the same sort of thing about his know-it-all supervisor at work that was always riding him to wear safetly glasses. After he got back from disability, the guy got him a couple of tickets to Avatar in 3d, just to be an asshole.

And you also know that you would need to monitor both incoming and outgoing network traffic (at the router, not the client) to make sure nothing is calling home to a command server? Because you know that there is yucky stuff out there that is NOT obvious in any way other than network traffic monitoring?

Why would I? My browser runs as a more restricted account than my main user account, I don't use Adobe's PDF reader. If I'm hit by drive-by malware that is sophisticated enough to use a privilege escalation exploit, the malware author is likely to know how to use virustotal etc and make sure his malware passes all AV checks. So AV software wouldn't save me either.They are unlikely to bother with my sort of config since they can already make money from the masses of people who need AV software, or from Gover

Yep. I got hit by it, and it took down Google Updater, Java Updater, and its own auto-update. Worst part is that it kept trying to relaunch the Sophos updater over and over again, prompting even more pop-up notices.

Weird thing here is that only 2 people I know were affected including me. Nobody else in this office was affected. My wife works on another campus (state university), and nobody in her office was hit.